Tuesday, 27 December 2016

There’s good news in Mosul — for now

There’s good news in Mosul — for now

The horrific stories from Aleppo — the bombings of pediatric
hospitals, the executions of fleeing women and children, the thousands
of men disappeared or press-ganged into military service — have obscured
something of a good news story unfolding just a couple of hundred miles
away across the Syria-Iraq border, in Mosul.

Humanitarian
agencies and human rights monitors say they have been shocked — in a
good way — by the behavior of the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces that are
slowly recapturing the city from the Islamic State. Elite
counter-terrorism troops are moving street by street through tightly
packed neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of people are still
living — only slightly more than 100,000 of
Mosul’s more than 1 million people have fled to camps outside the city.
Facing scores of suicide bombers, barrages of rockets and deadly
snipers, the Iraqis are taking heavy casualties — so much so that the
government protested when the United Nations reported that nearly 2,000 security force members were killed in November alone.

Yet
so far at least, the invading force has sought to protect rather than
slaughter the local population. There is no indiscriminate bombing or
shelling of apartment buildings; no executions of women and children; no
mass disappearances of men. In the camps, a majority of refugees are
saying that their needs are mostly being met and that they are better
off than they were under the Islamic State, according to a survey by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
“It’s remarkable how well civilians have been treated,” says Belkis
Wille, the Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Iraqi security
forces are behaving well.”

This is not to say that civilians are not being harmed. The U.N. reported that nearly 900 were killed in and around Mosul in October and November.
But most of the casualties have been inflicted by the Islamic State. In
contrast, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says it has
documented 19,000 killed and wounded in Aleppo since April, including 1,600 civilians killed by Russian and Syrian government airstrikes. The
Mosul difference may not last: The fight is an ugly one that could go
on for months. For now, though, the world is witnessing two radically
different models for the recapture of Arab cities. In Aleppo, there is
the scorched-earth, indiscriminate-massacre paradigm of Russia, Iran and
the regime of Bashar al-Assad; and in Mosul there is the civilian
protection strategy embraced by the Iraqi government of Haidar al-Abadi
under U.S. tutelage.

Several questions arise from this. Apart from the large savings in
human lives, will the different strategies lead to different political
outcomes? Will the humane treatment of Sunnis in Iraq create a chance
for political reconciliation that Syria does not have? And will the
disparity between Russian-Iranian brutality and U.S.-Iraqi humaneness
make any difference to other Arab regimes, global opinion or, for that
matter, incoming president Donald Trump?

In Iraq, it’s hard to be optimistic that the Shiite-led government
will come to terms with the Sunni and Kurdish minorities after the
Islamic State is defeated. A recent report
by the Institute for the Study of War says a new Sunni insurgency could
rise up after Mosul is recaptured, perhaps led by a revived version of
Saddam Hussein’s Baathist movement, or by al-Qaeda. That’s because the
military restraint of the Abadi government in Mosul has not been
accompanied by meaningful political outreach to Sunni leaders.

Still,
international monitors in Mosul see hopeful signs. The Norwegian
Refugee Council said its interviews in the camps outside Mosul showed
that the majority of displaced people were “upbeat” and “believed their
families would live in comfort and safety in Iraq in the future.” A
slight majority of respondents said they expected more conflict in Iraq
rather than peace and security, but the council said that looked good
compared with the “overwhelming consensus” on conflict it expected.
Wille
says that the decent treatment of Mosul civilians “is reinforcing the
belief of those just out of ISIS control that the state is indeed there
to protect and care for them . . . which bodes better for the social
contract going forward.” Mosul’s post-Islamic State leaders could have
the leeway to work with the Abadi government without appearing
traitorous to the locals.

Trump’s early decisions about the Middle
East could reinforce or reverse the positive trend. Will he stick with
the slow-but-humane strategy in Mosul, or will he demand that the city
and its terrorist defenders be bombed, Putin style? Will he leave U.S.
forces in Iraq after Mosul is recaptured, or withdraw and leave another
vacuum for Iran or al-Qaeda? Will he join Russia’s scorched-earth
campaign in Syria? The humanitarians quietly celebrating Mosul now have
much to fear in the near future.